After choosing and editing the photos and video I couldn't rest because I then had to write yesterday's blog/diary entry - and there was a lot of it to write. As I mentioned yesterday, I had another long and rambling call from my friend Lee that soaked up more of the morning. Finally I could put my feet up, but not for that long. I can't remember when it was, but my delivery from Amazon turned up earlier than expected. I think it was before 3pm, and possibly not that long after 1pm.

  I had two packets delivered. One contained a book about my exploits as a secret super hero......maybe !! Harry Harrison wrote some serious SciFi, and some funny SciFi, but when he wrote the series of books about "Bill, The Galactic Hero" he pulled out all the stops ! They contain every single B Movie cliché, and then some. It makes me wonder if some of these books were written under the influences of "certain substances".

  The other packet contained two external hard drives. I have to admit they did seem strangely cheap. The reason for this would soon become apparent because they are not what they are supposed to be. They are like the scam memory cards that a friend keeps buying from eBay - small drives marked, and reprogrammed to show a bigger capacity than they really have. The drives I bought seem to have the right capacity, but they are not what they seem.

  On the full Amazon page for these devices it says they have an M2 solid state hard drive in them, and as the abridged specification in the screenshot shows, they are supposed to be USB 3 devices. M2 solid state hard drives are very fast, and the USB 3 interface is also very fast. The trouble is that they have no M2 drive in them !
   Out of the two drives, one of them seemed to be incredibly slow. I tried to format the drive with the Linux ext4 file system, and the formatting crashed. I couldn't seem to get the drive to do anything after that. At that point I should have sent both drives back to Amazon (the other drive was not quite as slow, but still slow enough), but curiosity got the better of me. It was a bit of a struggle to get into it, but I opened it up, and found it was not as expected.

  There was no M2 drive, but a very cheap looking USB "thumb drive" plugged into a socket on an otherwise passive PCB used as a USB A to USB-C translator. After unplugging the USB thumb drive I tried to format it on a Windows PC. It seemed to start off OK, but eventually Windows choked on it, and left it in a half and half state. However, when I tried it on my Linux PC again I found I could format it to 1TB OK.

  I tried copying a couple of big files to it, and it seemed painfully slow. The curious thing is that the copying itself was at a usable speed, but for some reason the file manager seemed to hang for 10 to 20 minutes at the end. I am guessing it was doing some sort of verify, but doing it incredibly slowly. Later on I bypassed the file manager by using Lucky Backup - a backup program that just puts a simple user interface over a command line system. I am currently making a back up of a fairly full 1TB external hard drive.

  It has been running for just over 11 hours now, and it reports it is 48% through the job. That is bloody slow, but it does seem to be working OK. Once it finally finishes I shall use the new copy as the working drive, and keep the original as the back up copy because I do not trust this new abomination of a drive to not go corrupt at the drop of the hat. The other drive, which seems a little bit faster, I will be using to hold all my mp3 files, but I don't trust that either. It will be convenient to have all the files on one drive, but I will carefully preserve the source drives.

  I think I mentioned that I had the grilled wings, and some samosas, from my takeaway order on Thursday night, for what I guess should be called brunch. Last night I had almost the last of that takeaway for dinner. It was the chicken shish kebab with a portion of salad. (I do have one more portion of salad left, but it is probably deteriorating now). It was very nice, and very healthy. I followed it with a tub of tried and tested low calorie/sugar Aldi ice cream.

  After dinner I relaxed by watching a lot more TV than I expected to. First of all there were two Star Treks, and then it was over to Sky Arts for some programmes about music. One was a sort of documentary homage to heavy metal music. That was quite good. That was followed by the second part of the 4 part series about "The Art Of Drumming". That was both annoying and interesting. Drumming is both complicated, and needs a lot of stamina, but while other drummers find it fascinating, I just find it is a complete racket that only works when combined with guitars and vocals. It is like the stitching on a garment - it has no beauty itself, but holds the garment together.

  The third music programme was over 2 hours long, and was an autobiography of David Crosby (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Crosby). I must admit that after checking the wikipedia page, I am surprised he is still alive, and still performing despite being almost 80 years old. In his time he wrote and sung some great music - particularly as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In his life he had been seriously addicted to drugs that caused him to lose friends and lovers, but got clean in the end, and now seems quite robust for someone his age. It was one of those stories that was both very sad, but also a triumph.

  The programme finished at about 10 past midnight, and I hurried to bed as soon as it finished. I didn't try and go to sleep as soon as I got in bed, but read for a while to relax myself. I guess I fell asleep around 1am this morning. I think I mostly slept OK last night. I can't recall any time when I seemed to be awake for long in the night. My only regret is that I didn't sleep for longer. I do try to get 8 hours, or even more in these short, and gloomy winter days. Last night I probably only got 6 hours. Oh well, it is a great excuse for a few snoozes today.

  One thing that was very pleasing this morning was that a combination of some exercise, and what I ate, means that my blood glucose has come right down to my target of 7.5mmol/l. I have doubts that it will stay that low on a cold wet day when I have strong doubts that I will be going out, and maybe I have already eaten something stupid, but maybe if I took extra care today....

  It is certainly wet and disgusting outside at the moment, and I have no desire to leave the house. Later on it should stop raining, and although still too cloudy for any hint of sunshine, it should be brighter. I guess I could go out then, but it will still be extremely muddy in the park - assuming I would go into the Linear Park - I could go elsewhere. Fortunately I could be saved from such madness by the expectation of another book or two arriving today. Today may not be an exciting day, but I guess I'll be satisfied to just stay warm and dry.